Wireless communication systems are well known in the art. Within such systems, a fixed infrastructure is used to provide a variety of services to wireless units (e.g., mobile and/or portable radios). In many systems, particularly conventional and trunked land mobile radio systems, the fixed infrastructure includes one or more consoles (or operator positions). A console allows a dispatch operator to coordinate communications among the wireless units, as well as to communicate with the wireless units. As an example of a service within a console-equipped system, a dispatch operator can create temporary talk groups (logical groupings of wireless units created for the purpose of group-wide communications) and exchange communications with members of the temporary talk group. The ability to creatte temporary talk groups (often referred to as "patch") is useful, for example, when responding to emergency conditions. A variety of other services akin to the creation of temporary talk groups are also commonly available, such as emergency alarm, emergency call, private conversation, and call alert.
However, the use of any given service is limited by the particular service logic available to the communication equipment that implements the service, e.g., the console. The software available to the equipment typically limits the use of services in that the services may not be modified to fit the needs of a particular user or to meet the needs of a given set of circumstances. Currently, whenever a new service is required by a user of a wireless system, the manufacturer of the wireless system must first engage in an expensive and time-consuming process of designing and testing the new service before providing the service to the user. As the sophistication of the new services increases, the cost, complexity and time required to provide such new services correspondingly increases. Although not currently possible, it is recognized that it would be desirable to allow new services to be implemented "on the fly" by users as the need for such new services become apparent.
Various standards bodies, such as the International Telecommunications Union (ITU-T), have made recommendations for the so-called Intelligent Network, and have begun to generally outline the concept of a "Rapid Service Creation Environment". Strides have been made in "rapid service creation" in the area of wireline networks, i.e., telephone networks. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,315,646 and 5,345,380 to Babson et al., 5,323,452 to Dicikman et al., and 5,481,601 to Nazif et al. illustrate various methods and apparatuses for the creation and provisioning of unique call services in telephone networks. In general, these patents describe a system in which a hardware interface (e.g., a computer with a display terminal) is provided that allows a user to manipulate abstract building blocks and thereby create, simulate and provide new telephone-based services. However, these techniques are limited to wireline environments.
Additionally, the services created using these techniques are not executable by the platform that is allowed to create them. That is, the actual execution of the newly created services must be distributed to other network entities, such as telco switches and service control points. This is a suitable limitation in a telephone system comprising a large number of processing devices. However, such a distributed implementation is not cost-scaleable to smaller, wireless communication systems in which there is a relatively small number of processing devices within the fixed infrastructure. Furthermore, a limitation of wireless communication systems is the presence of noise, interference and other factors that limit performance within the system. The presence of these limiting factors, not otherwise found in wireline systems, gives rise to special processing needs such as message retries and exception handling. In view of these limitations of the prior art and the circumstances typically arising in wireless systems, there exists a need for techniques that provide rapid service creation in wireless communication systems.